Education is not Music: A Long Winded Agreement with Aaron Bady

Posted: December 18, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Mark Guzdial has been posting a great deal on MOOCs, as have we all although Mark is much easier to read than I am, and his recent comment on Aaron Bady’s response to Clay Shirky’s “Udacity is Napster” drew me to the great article by Bady and the following key quote inside Bady’s article:

“I think teaching is very different from music”

and I couldn’t agree more. Let me briefly list why I feel that a comparison to Napster has no real validity, to agree with Aaron that Clay Shirky’s argument is not well grounded for the discussion of education. What’s interesting is that I believe that Shirky identifies this point in his own essay, but doesn’t quite realise the full implications of what he’s saying:

Starting with Edison’s wax cylinders, and continuing through to Pandora and the iPod, the biggest change in musical consumption has come not from production but playback.

…

Those earlier inventions systems started out markedly inferior to the high-cost alternative: records were scratchy, PCs were crashy. But first they got better, then they got better than that, and finally, they got so good, for so cheap, that they changed people’s sense of what was possible.

The first thing we need to remember about music is that music is inherently fungible because, when viewed as a piece of work, you can replace it with another effectively identical item. Of course, here we need to be careful and define what we need by identical, because music, as it turns out, is almost never identical but it gets treated that way. If you doubt this, then go and review how much it costs to insert the song “Happy Birthday to You” into a movie or TV show. It doesn’t matter if it’s Homer Simpson yelling it drunkenly, or the Three Tenors singing it sotto voce as part of an Ally McBeal shower hallucination flashback, you will still be liable to fork out dollars to the company who claims to hold the copyright. If you understand the history of how we even made music small enough to send across the (much, much slower back then) Internet, we had to start with the MP3 format, which threw away enough ‘unneeded’ data from the original CD files to shrink the files to a little less than 10% of their original size. This is the technology that we needed before we could even get around the idea of Napster, because enough people had enough music on their hard drives (because we’d already dropped the size) to make file sharing useful. However, as Shirky also notes in his article, this lossy compression technique changes the way that music sounds and you can tell the difference if you listen carefully and know what to listen for. Yet, this is the same song and Napster got into trouble for sharing compressed artefacts of lower quality and perceptible difference from the CD originals, because music, as this kind of artefact, is fungible despite very different levels of quality. Identical, to an audiophile, means sounding precisely the same (or true to the source, really), but identical to the copyright owner is a representation that clearly indicates unauthorised use of copyright material – which is why George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord” ended up begin described as sufficiently similar to “He’s So Fine”, despite it being a brand new recording and not just a compressed copy.

So, yes, Shirky’s original quotes are both true – we have improved playback and while MP3 is still very common, lossless and much higher quality reproductions are now available. However, the point that has been missed is that the vast majority of people do not care in the slightest. The average person will only notice a shift from MP3 to lossless if they suddenly discover that their iPod has dropped in capacity, when measured in number of songs, by a significant margin. If I listen to “Viva La Vida” by Coldplay, and yes, Joe Satriani fans, I picked that deliberately, then the effective difference in my enjoyment of the song, my ability to sing along tunelessly in the shower and the ability to recite the words if asked, has nothing to do with the quality. This is not true of certain pieces of classical music, where the compression artefacts start to have more of an effect, but these are not the core business of file sharers and those who trade in compressed artefacts. However, MP3 artefacts rarely sound like long scratches, dust on the record or a bad needle – yes, they can be irritating, but the electronic form, pre and post-compression, is generally protected from such things unless you get some serious cosmic ray action in your storage media and even then, you have to be very unlucky.

The Napster music argument, for me, falls down because the increase in quality does not have a direct connection to what the majority of the user base would have considered an acceptable product. Yes, it’s better now but, for most people, so what? Music sharing services are considered useful and valuable because they share songs that people want, where most people don’t think about the quality, they accept the name and the recognisable nature of the song as enough.

This is not at all true for education, because educational experiences vary wildly between lecturers, courses, institutions and eras to an extent that it is impossible to consider them in any way to be interchangeable – quality, here, is everything. If you have an international articulation program, you know that the first thing you have to do is to work out what has been taught, and how it has been taught, inside a course of the same name as one of yours. Even ‘name equivalence’ doesn’t mean anything here and we do not, or we should not, grant standing based on a coincidence of name for a course. There is no parallel guarantee that my low quality version of a course will give me the same ability to “sing in the shower” as the high quality course will – and this is, for me, an unassailable difference.

There is no doubt that the opportunities that might be offered by blended learning, full electronic offerings, and, yes, MOOCs (however they end up being defined) are something that we have to consider because, if they work, they allow us to educate the world, but claiming that this must occur because Udacity is like Napster completely ignores the core difference between education and music in terms of the consumer base and their focus on what it means for a service to meet their requirements. If students didn’t care about the perceived quality, then we wouldn’t have the notion of the ‘top schools’ or ‘low end schools’, so we know that this thinking exists. A student will happily put an MP3 on at a party, but it remains to be seen if they will constantly and out of design, not desperation, put a MOOC course on a job application, and expect a good result from it.

Learner Pull and Educator Push

Posted: November 21, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

We were discussing some of the strategic investments that might underpin my University’s progress for the next 5 years (all very hand wavy as we don’t yet have the confirmed strategy for the next 5 years) and we ended up discussing Learner Push and Educator Pull – in the context of MOOCs, unsurprisingly.

We know that if all we do is push content to people then we haven’t really undertaken any of the learning experience construction that we’re supposed to. If we expect students to mysteriously know what they need and then pull it all towards them, then we’re assuming that students are automatically self-educating and this is, fairly obviously, not universally true or there would have been no need for educational institutions for… hundreds of thousands of years.

What we actually have is a combination of push and pull from both sides, maintaining the right tension if you will, and it’s something that we have to think about the moment that we talk about any kind of information storage system. A library is full of information but you have to know what you’re looking for, where to find out and you have to want to find it! I’ve discussed on other blogs my concerns about the disconnected nature of MOOCs and the possibility of students “cherry picking” courses that are of interest to them but lead nowhere in terms of the construction of a professional level of knowledge.

Mark Guzdial recently responded to a comment of mine to remind me of the Gates Foundation initiative to set up eight foundation courses based on MOOCs but that’s a foundation level focus – how do we get from there to fourth year engineers or computer scientists? Part of the job of the educator is to construct an environment where the students not only want the knowledge but they want, and here’s the tricky bit, the right knowledge. So rather than forcing content down the student’s throat (the incorrect assumption of educator push, in my opinion) we are creating an environment that inspires, guides and excites – and pushing that.

I know that my students have vast amounts of passion and energy – the problem is getting it directed in the right way!

It’s great to be talking about some of these philosophical issues as we look forward over the next 5-10 years because, of course, by itself the IT won’t fix any of our problems unless we use it correctly. As an Associate Dean (IT) and a former systems administrator, I know that spending money on IT is easy but it’s always very easy to spend a lot of money and make no progress. Good, solid, principles help a lot and, while we have a lot of things to sort out, it’s going to be interesting to see how things develop, especially with the concept of the MOOC floating above us.

More MOOCs! (Still writing up ICER, sorry!)

Posted: September 12, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Gates Foundation is offering grants for MOOCs in Introductory Classes. I mentioned in an earlier post that if we can show that MOOCs work, then generally available and cheap teaching delivery is a fantastically transformative technology. You can read the press release but it’s obvious that this has some key research questions in it, much as we’ve all been raising:

The foundation wants to know, for instance, which students benefit most from MOOC’s (sic) and which kinds of courses translate best to that format.

Yes! If these courses do work then for whom do they work and which courses? There’s little doubt that the Gates have been doing some amazing things with their money and this looks promising – of course, now I have to find out if my University has been invited to join and, if so, how I can get involved. (Of course, if they haven’t, then it’s time to put on my dancing trousers and try to remedy that situation.)

However, money plus research questions is a good direction to go in.

A side post on MOOCs: angrymath Hates Statistics 101

Posted: September 11, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

A friend just forwarded me a rather scathing critique of one of the Udacity courses. The rather aptly named angrymath has published Udacity Statistics 101. To forewarn you, this is one of the leading quotes:

In brief, here is my overall assessment: the course is amazingly, shockingly awful.

As one of the commenters put it, hopefully the problems are growing pains and iteration towards perfection will continue. I haven’t seen the course in question so can’t comment, merely present.

Musing on MOOCs

Posted: August 24, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Mark Guzdial’s blog contains a number of posts where he looks at Massive Open On-line Courses (MOOCs) but a recent one on questionable student behaviour made me think about how students act and, from the link where students sign up multiple times so that they can accumulate a ‘perfect’ score for one of their doppelgängers, why a student would go to so much trouble in a course. As the post that Mark refers to asks, is this a student retaking the course/redoing an assignment until they achieve mastery (which is highly desirable) or are they recording their attempts and finding the right answer through exhausting the search space (which is not productive and starts to look like cheating, if it isn’t actually cheating – it’s certainly against the terms of service of the courses.)

Why is this important? It’s important because MOOCs look great in terms of investment and return. Set up a MOOC and you can have 100,000 students enrol! One instructor, maybe a handful of TAs, some courseware – 100,000 students! (Some of the administrators in my building have just had to break out the smelling salts at the thought of income to expenditure ratio.) Of course, this assumes that we’re charging, which most don’t just for participation although you may get charged a fee for anything that allows you to derive accreditation. It also assumes that 100,000 students turns into some reasonable number of completions, which it also doesn’t and, as has been discussed elsewhere, plagiarism/copying is a pretty big problem.

Hang on. The course is free. It’s voluntary to sign-up to in the vast majority of cases. Why are people carrying out this kind of behaviour in a voluntary, zero-cost course? One influence is possible future accreditation, where students regard their previous efforts as a dry-run to get a high percentage outcome on a course from a prestigious institution. I’ll leave those last two words hanging there while I talk about James Joyce for a moment.

If you know of James Joyce, or you’ve read any James Joyce, you may be able to guess the question that I’m about to ask.

“Have you read and finished Ulysses?”

Joyce’s Ulysses is regarded as one of the best English-language novels of the 20th Century. However, at over 250,000 words long (that’s longer than the longest Harry Potter, by the way, and about half the count of Lord of the Rings) , full of experimental techniques, complexity and a stream-of-consciousness structure, it isn’t exactly accessible to a vast number of readers. But, because it is widely regarded as a very important novel, it is often a book that people are planning to read. Or, having started, that they plan to finish.

However, the number of people that have actually read Ulysses, all the way through and reading every word, is probably quite small. The whole ‘books I claim to have read’ effect is discussed reasonably often. From that link:

Asked if they had ever claimed to read a book when they had not, 65% of respondents said yes and 42% said they had falsely claimed to have read Orwell’s classic [1984] in order to impress. This is followed by Tolstoy’s War and Peace (31%), James Joyce’s Ulysses (25%) and the Bible (24%).

So, having possibly neither started nor finished, they claim that they have read it, because of the prestige of the work. 42% of people claim to, but haven’t read 1984, which, compared to Ulysses, is positively a pamphlet – a bus ticket aphorism in terms of relative length and readability. And we see that the other three books on the list are large, long and somewhat ponderous. (Sorry, Tolstoy, but we don’t all get locked into our dachas for 6 months when it snows.) 1984, of course, is in the public eye because of the ‘Big Brother’ associations and the on-going misinterpretation of the work as predictive, rather than as an insightful and brooding reflection of Eric’s dislike of the BBC and post-war London. (Sorry, that’s a bit glib, but I’m trying to keep it short.)

I have read Ulysses but I think it fair to say that I read it, and forced myself to complete it, for entirely the wrong reasons. Now that I enjoy the work of the Modernists far more, I’m planning to return to Ulysses and see how much I enjoy the journey this time – especially as I shall be reading it for my own reasons. But, the first time, I read it and completed it because of the prestige of the work and because I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. (Hint: it’s about a day in Dublin.)

I think there’s an intersection between the mindset that would make you claim to read a book that you had not, for reasons of prestige rather than purely for tribal membership, and that required to take a MOOC from Stanford, Harvard or Berkeley, and to falsify your progress by copying answers from other people or by solemnly duplicating your identities to accumulate enough answers to be able to ‘graduate’ summa cum laude. In this case, taking a course from one of these august institutions, especially in these days of the necessity of having a college degree for many jobs that have no professional requirement for it, is better than not. Completing assignments to a high standard, however you achieve it, may start to define your worth – this is a conjunction of prestige and tribalism that may one day allow you to become a graduate of University X (even if it is tagged as on-line or there is subsequent charging or marking load for accreditation).

And here we find our strong need for real evidence of the efficacy of the MOOC approach. Let’s assume that we solve the identity problem and can now attach work to a person reliably – how will we measure if someone is seeking mastery or is actually trying to cheat? We can ask that now – is the student who seeks questions to previous examinations testing their understanding and knowledge or conducting a brute force attack against our test bank? If MOOCs can work then the economies of scale make them a valuable tool for education but there are so many confounding factors as we try to assess these new courses: high sign-up rates with very low completion rates, high levels of plagiarism, obvious and detectable levels of gaming and all of this happening before they actually become strong alternatives to the traditional approach.

It would be easy to dismiss my comments as those of a disgruntled traditionalist but that would be wrong. What I need is evidence of what works. I have largely abandoned lectures in favour of collaborative and interactive sessions because the efficacy of the new approach became apparent – through research and evidence. Similarly for my investigation into deadlines and assessment, evidence drove me here.

If MOOCs work, then I would expect to see evidence that they do. If they don’t, then I don’t want students to sign up to something that doesn’t work, potentially at the expense of other educational opportunities that do work, any more than I want someone to stop taking their medication because someone convinces them that unverifiable alternatives are better. If MOOCs don’t quite work yet, by collecting evidence, maybe we can make them work, or part of our other courses, or produce something that benefits all of us.

It’s not about tradition or exclusivity, it’s about finding what works, which is all about collecting evidence, constructing hypotheses and testing them. Then we can find out what actually works.

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